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I was about to say that it is very useful material to learn. But looking at the syllabus link, I realized that I took the AB course (long ago), which has apparently been discontinued. The course I took was a pretty solid basic introduction to CS.

At the very least though, doing the AP will let you comfortably place out of the "Intro to Programming" course and skip right to the real intro CS course -- for that reason it is worthwhile.

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Is the course learning Java or an introduction to programming? It looks like the old course was based on learning C and C++, but now it seems like they have focused on Java for easier learning / usage. I have gone through some stuff on the C and C++ curriculum and it does look very worthwhile (although it is discontinued), but the Java program looks much weaker, only covering basic algorithms and skipping pointers, etc.

A lot of the AB test was learning Java (took it in Spring 08). Despite that, I loved the class because of my teacher, who taught us enough that I was running into things through my sophomore year that I learned from the class.

Unless your school has a particularly good teacher, I'd recommend self-studying it, since you seem to get along fine doing that.

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